Between Screen and World | Inside Out: A Conversation with Chen-Yi Wu
- ELSEHERE
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Chen-Yi Wu works across image and text, moving between documentary filmmaking, photography, illustration, writing, teaching, programming, and collaboration as interconnected forms of inquiry. Her practice is shaped by mediation, cross-cultural experience, and the instability of identity in public language, but it is equally concerned with how stories move between people, formats, and social worlds. In this edited text-based conversation, she reflects on image-saturated childhoods, bilingual formation, the structure of digital relation, and the difficulty, and necessity, of remaining open across disciplines.
ELSEHERE: Before you had a name for what you were doing, was there an earlier way you understood yourself in relation to the world?
Chen-Yi Wu: I was born in the 1990s, and my childhood was filled with all kinds of media: DVDs, television films, storybooks. I was also enrolled in art classes from a young age. You could say I grew up in an image-saturated environment, one that has only intensified into a kind of visual overflow in adulthood.
Compared to speaking, I have always been more drawn to writing and reading. Those formative experiences shaped my creative practice profoundly. Images and text come to me intuitively, almost like a mother tongue.
ELSEHERE: Looking back, was there an early experience of language, distance, migration, or mediation that quietly shaped the way you now work across image and text?
Chen-Yi Wu: Because of Taiwan’s unique political context, children of my generation were introduced early to bilingual education, English and Mandarin, as well as to dominant cultural influences from Europe and the United States: Western art, Christmas, Hollywood films, and so on.
I think millennials tend to have a relatively high tolerance for change and fluidity. I find myself constantly drawn to new ideas and emerging forms. That early exposure to multiple languages and overlapping cultural systems shaped the way I think, and also the way I work. It made it natural for me to move between image and text, and to understand mediation itself as part of lived experience.
ELSEHERE: Is there something from that earlier period that still operates in your practice now, not as subject matter, but as rhythm, atmosphere, or way of structuring relation?
Chen-Yi Wu: Yes. I think what remains is not any one image or memory, but a way of moving between things. I grew up inside layered systems of language, image, and cultural reference, and that produced a certain comfort with mediation, fragmentation, and transition. In my work now, that often appears less as a direct subject than as a way of structuring attention, relation, and feeling.
ELSEHERE: You move across documentary filmmaking, photography, illustration, writing, teaching, festival programming, and nonprofit collaboration. What is the question, pressure, or condition that most consistently organizes your practice across these forms?
Chen-Yi Wu: Across these different roles, I remain most invested in the relationship between the individual and the social world. I see storytelling as a way to trace how personal experience is shaped by broader structures, and also as a means of opening space for dialogue across cultural and disciplinary boundaries.
ELSEHERE: You describe image and text as interconnected forms of inquiry. What kinds of thinking become possible for you only when those two are held in relation, rather than treated separately?
Chen-Yi Wu: For me, image and text do different but closely related kinds of work. When they are brought into relation, they can loosen each other. An image can hold ambiguity, atmosphere, or contradiction without resolving it too quickly. Text can redirect attention, complicate what seems visible, or open another level of reading.
I don’t think of them as two separate tools that happen to coexist. They are already part of the same thought process. That is why moving between them feels intuitive to me.
ELSEHERE: In Meeting Room Simulation, why did this work need to take the form of a browser-based, navigable experience rather than a linear film or essay?
Chen-Yi Wu: In terms of form, I believe the closer the work is to the experience of an online meeting, the better. Online meetings take place on the internet and on screens, so presenting it as a browser-based work creates the strongest impact. It also encourages reflection while maximizing a sense of playfulness.
A browser-based, navigable structure allows the work to feel closer to the conditions it is examining. It is not simply about representing online communication. It is also about placing the viewer inside a related mode of attention and uncertainty.
ELSEHERE: The work speaks to the hollowness of digital connection, where communication ripples outward and remains unheard, unanswered, undone. What made you trust indirection, fragmentation, and user uncertainty as part of the structure of the work?
Chen-Yi Wu: I think this is closely tied to how I understand art. To me, art is about loosening established frameworks rather than asserting an authoritative voice. Indirection, fragmentation, and uncertainty are all ways of reinterpreting the world we think we know.
It is precisely within those gaps and fissures that new connections between ourselves and the world can emerge. I didn’t want the work to explain itself too neatly. I wanted it to produce a certain instability, because that instability is part of the experience it is trying to address.
ELSEHERE: Across your practice, you seem consistently invested in how stories are shaped and shared across different audiences. What changes, for you, when storytelling is understood not only as expression, but as a social relation?
Chen-Yi Wu: When storytelling is understood as a social relation, it becomes less about transmitting a finished idea and more about how meaning is formed across distance, context, and audience. It asks not only what is being said, but also how it travels, who it reaches, and what kinds of structures are already shaping its reception.
That is part of why I’ve remained interested not only in making work, but also in teaching, festival programming, and collaborative platforms. Stories do not exist in isolation. They always move through social space.
ELSEHERE: Your work often engages identity, memory, cross-cultural experience, and the Asian diaspora. What do you feel is most often flattened or prematurely understood when those terms enter public discourse?
Chen-Yi Wu: I think that when we talk about identity today, many of the competing voices and tensions come from the fact that identity is not a fixed concept, nor is it something we can simply return to as an origin.
Yet in struggles for rights and recognition, there is often a tendency to solidify the traits of a given group so they can function as leverage for negotiation or resistance, almost like a checklist: only if you meet certain criteria can you be considered part of this group, and only then are you allowed to speak on its behalf.
I find this kind of binary thinking dangerous. It compresses the space for dialogue and limits the possibilities for exploration both within and across communities.
ELSEHERE: You write that the internet appears both safe and dangerous, both real and illusory. What kind of world does Meeting Room Simulation believe we are living in?
Chen-Yi Wu: During the conceptual and production stages, I approached the project from the perspective that the internet is illusory. That said, I’m not personally that pessimistic. I chose that point of departure mainly because I wanted to use game mechanics to remind players that what we see and experience on screens cannot fully represent the real world.
There is no single answer to what human connection is, or how it is built, sustained, and developed.
I have online friends I’ve known since I was thirteen or fourteen. Even though we’ve never met in person, we still hold reading sessions together and occasionally talk on the phone. On the other hand, I’ve lost touch with most of the classmates I saw every day in middle school and high school.
In recent years, living abroad has led me to see the internet more as an extension of the real world. If I want to build a meaningful connection with someone, the most grounded and tangible approach is still to meet in person first, and then use the internet to maintain that relationship. No matter how advanced technology becomes, I believe face-to-face interaction remains the most valuable and organic form of human connection.
ELSEHERE: At this stage of your life and work, what feels most urgent for you to keep pursuing, even if it remains difficult to articulate clearly?
Chen-Yi Wu: I’ve always been drawn to the idea of being a generalist. At the same time, contemporary society tends to prioritize efficiency, return on investment, and specialized division of labor.
There have been moments, when applying for jobs or grants, when I’ve tried to evaluate my résumé from the perspective of a potential employer or funder and realized that my experiences are quite varied. In many cases, they might prefer someone with deep specialization in a single field rather than a generalist like me.
Still, I believe that maintaining curiosity across different disciplines has been one of the greatest driving forces in my growth. I hope that one day I’ll find a balance between the two.
ELSEHERE: What has life taught you that your field, training, or theory alone could not?
Chen-Yi Wu: That uncertainty is not always a problem to solve. Sometimes it is the condition under which a more honest relation to the world becomes possible. Living across different contexts has taught me that meaning is rarely stable, and that people often live inside forms of contradiction that theory alone cannot fully account for.
ELSEHERE: When people encounter your work, what do you hope stays with them after the screen is closed, the text disappears, or the interaction ends?
Chen-Yi Wu: I hope something remains unsettled in a productive way. Not confusion for its own sake, but a slight shift in how they understand what feels familiar. If the work can leave behind a different sensitivity to connection, mediation, or distance, then I feel it has done something meaningful.
ELSEHERE: When you are no longer present, what would you want the work to continue doing without you?
Chen-Yi Wu: I would want it to keep opening space. Not to deliver a final message on my behalf, but to continue making room for reflection, dialogue, and connection across people and contexts I will never fully know.
About Chen-Yi Wu
Chen-Yi Wu is a Taiwanese artist based in Philadelphia. Drawing from a background in literature, theater, and filmmaking, she works across documentary film, photography, illustration, and critical writing as interconnected forms of inquiry. Her practice often engages questions of identity, memory, mediation, and cross-cultural experience, with particular attention to the Asian diaspora. Through both visual and written forms, she seeks to create spaces for reflection, dialogue, and connection across communities.
About Inside Out
Inside Out is ELSEHERE’s long-form conversation series, published through STRATUM. It begins from the belief that before artists are understood through category, institution, or medium, they must also be encountered through the deeper structures that shape a practice over time: memory, method, contradiction, relation, and the conditions of life pressing from within the work. This conversation with Chen-Yi Wu has been edited from her written responses for publication.
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